


Lesson One

by prepare4trouble



Series: Little By Little [34]
Category: Star Wars: Rebels
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Blind Kanan Jarrus, Disappointment, Even when she doesn't want to, Ezra Has a Bad Day, Ezra gets a hug, Ezra likes to block his emotions, Ezra needs a hug, Force Training, Gen, Gratuitous shirtless Kanan, Hera and Kanan have a disagreement, Hera being Captain Syndulla, Visually Impaired Ezra Bridger, conditions of return to duty
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-03
Updated: 2017-07-18
Packaged: 2018-11-22 23:32:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 12,606
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11390718
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prepare4trouble/pseuds/prepare4trouble
Summary: A conversation with Ezra doesn't go entirely as Hera had planned, Ezra decides it's time to move on with his training, and Kanan is unprepared.





	1. Chapter 1

Ezra was lying on the bed not doing much of anything when the door of his room opened unexpectedly. He sat up instantly, swung his legs around to the side of the bed, and hoped it looked like he had just been about to get up anyway. He hadn’t been sulking, not this time, and he didn’t want anybody to get the wrong idea.

Hera looked at him across the room; she stood just outside the door, still in §the corridor. She didn’t appear to react to his hasty attempt to look busy, it was almost as though she hadn’t even noticed. Or didn’t care. She wore an oddly determined look on her face, lips pressed together as though steeling herself for something.

Sato had arrived back at the base last night. Or at least, that was when he had been scheduled to arrive. If he had been on time, she would have had time to speak to him by now, either the night before, or earlier this morning. She might have news. He tried not to squint to focus his vision in an attempt to read her expression. The Force revealed nothing to him.

“Hey, Hera,” he said. He tried to keep his voice calm, but it emerged a little too high-pitched, too eager. He pushed himself off of the bunk and dropped to the floor next to the bed, folded his arms and tried to look casual, disinterested. He didn’t care what she had to say, it didn’t matter. Not important. “What’s up?” he asked. He heard his voice trembling slightly.

Hera took a deep breath, then pressed her lips together before the replied. “Can you meet me on the Phantom in about ten minutes?” she said.

Ezra blinked. “Sure, wh…?” he stopped, she was already gone.

He stared at the closed door left in her wake, his mind racing. That had to be a good thing, surely. Why else would she want him on the Phantom if he wasn’t cleared for duty? Was this her way of telling him, by taking him with her on a mission? He wondered where they were going, what they were going to do.

It didn’t matter. It was still something; a beginning. A return to a kind of normality.

Hopefully.

He scrambled to get ready, hurriedly pulling on his boots and running his fingers through his close-cropped hair, before checking his comms unit was attached to his wrist and rushing out of the door.

His footsteps echoed loudly on the floor as he raced in the direction of the new Phantom. He reached the ship and let himself onboard before even Hera arrived. He sunk into the copilot’s seat, leaned against the backrest, and waited, not quite able to keep the smile from his face.

* * *

For the most part, Hera liked the increased responsibility that came with her role as Phoenix Leader. However, there were times when she felt that she would gladly trade in the autonomy and respect the rank afforded, just to get out of a difficult conversation. This was one of those times.

She walked slowly, feeling her own reluctance holding her back, almost as though it were a physical force surrounding her. She ignored it, kept her gaze forward and her chin raised as she approached and entered the ship.

She started in surprise to find Ezra already seated in the copilot’s seat, carefully examining the controls, hunched over a little, presumably to better allow him to read the labels on some of the switches.

She felt her heart sink as he turned to look at her with an excited grin. “You fixed it with Sato?” he asked. “Where are we going?”

Hera pressed her lips together, and sat down in the other seat.

“Anybody else coming?” Ezra asked her.

She shook her head. “Not for this,” she told him.

With practiced skill, she piloted the ship out of the base’s airspace and into a low orbit, all the while feeling Ezra’s eyes burning into the side of her face as his excitement and curiosity morphed into confusion at her lack of an explanation.

“Will you at least tell me what you said to Sato to change his mind?” he asked her, finally.

Hera sighed, programmed the autopilot to continue orbiting the planet for now, and turned to look at him for the first time. “Nothing,” she said.

Ezra frowned, obviously and understandably confused. “What do you mean? He just decided on his own?”

She swallowed, and licked her lips. “I spoke to Sato yesterday,” she told him. “We agreed that you’re a member of my team, and so it should be my call whether or not you’re fit for duty. He left it as my decision.”

“That’s great!” Ezra began, grinning widely.

“No,” she shook her head, “wait. Let me finish.” She took a deep breath, and made a conscious decision not to give into the temptation to look out of the view screen, or busy herself programming insignificant course changes as she spoke. “I will clear you for duty,” she told him, “just as soon as I’m confident that you’re ready. There are some conditions I need you to…”

“What? But…” Ezra interrupted. Before her eyes, his elation turned to confusion, then to hurt, and finally to anger. “What do you mean ‘ready’? How can I possibly not be ready to do something I’ve been doing for years?”

Hera sighed, and finally, briefly, gave into the temptation to look away. The view of the planet below filled the view screen. “I know,” she said. “Just hear me out, okay?”

Ezra shook his head from side to side in clear disbelief. He got to his feet and quickly walked the length of the small vessel, turned and walked back. “Why’d you bring me up here?” he asked. “If you’re just going to tell me no, why didn’t you do it back on the Ghost?”

“I’m not just telling you no,” Hera told him.

He scoffed, head still shaking, still pacing. “Take us back down,” he demanded.

Hera spun in her seat to regard him, deliberately keeping her expression neutral. “Why?” she asked. “So you can leave?”

“Yes!” he said. “Exactly! Obviously you don’t need me here, because you don’t think I’m ‘ready’. Never mind that I was on the mission where we got this ship, I was ready then. And the one…”

“Where we lost the last one?” Hera regretted her words instantly. That was in the past. Over and done, forgiven, if not forgotten. By mutual, unspoken understanding, nobody had brought it up since the night of their return. She shook her head. “Sorry.”

Ezra folded his arms across his chest defensively, and looked down at his feet. “Why are we up here?” he asked.

“Sit down,” Hera told him. She reached across and patted the back of the copilot’s seat invitingly.

Ezra shook his head and tightened the grip of his arms across his body. “Why’d you trap me up in here?”

Hera sighed. “Okay, fine. We’re up here so that we can have a conversation without you leaving in the middle when things get too hard.”

He stared at her for a moment, before his eyes began to dart around the ship again. “I don’t do that,” he muttered.

“You and Kanan came to tell me about your condition,” she said. “Halfway through you decided to leave. Same thing when you told Sabine and Zeb. Before that, when we were _discussing_ telling Sabine and Zeb…” and Ezra hadn’t been able to read the text on her datapad...

“It wasn’t like that,” Ezra told her. “I always had a good reason for leaving…”

“I know. You left because you wanted out of the conversation.”

Ezra shook his head. “No, I…”

“Yes,” she countered. “And that’s fine. I don’t blame you for that. But the truth of the matter is, you have difficulty talking about this and your solution to that is to take yourself away from it. I understand that, I’ve done it myself more than a few times. But we do need to have this discussion, and I need you to be present for it. Frankly, this was the only way I could think of to ensure that.”

“By tricking me,” Ezra muttered.

Hera patted the seat again. “I’m sorry if you think that. I didn't mean for you to misunderstand. Sit down, talk to me. Please?”

Ezra hesitated, took a step toward the chair, then stopped again. “And then you’ll take me back?”

“Yes, Ezra. I have no intention of keeping you here forever.”

Ezra approached the chair as cautiously as if it were a wounded animal. Finally he sat down, turned it forwards, and stared out of the view screen. His arms were still folded, and he was very deliberately not looking at her.

“Good,” she said. “Thank you.” 

Ezra rotated the chair incrementally, turning a fraction of a degree further away from her. Hera took a deep breath, filling her lungs slowly, and then released it through pursed lips. Now that it came time to finally have this conversation, she found herself at a loss for words; all the carefully planned points and counter-arguments abandoned her in an instant and she, too, almost wished that she could escape the situation.

She parted her lips just slightly, preparing to speak, when Ezra broke the silence for her. He spoke quietly. His voice trembled; not with anger or rage, she realized, but with with the effort that he was clearly putting in to prevent himself from crying. He rotated his chair further still, until she found herself looking at the back of his head.

“You always said we were family. Family supports each other. You’re supposed to be on my side in this.”

Hera bit her bottom lip and fought the urge to look away herself. “I am on your side, Ezra. We all are. It’s just, there are no sides here, not really. There’s only what’s happening and what we need to do to deal with it.”

Ezra made a sound, somewhere between a scoff and sob. He raised a hand and rubbed at the cheek below one eye, as though he was scratching an itch. He still wasn’t looking at her. “ _We_ don’t need to deal with anything, I’m the one who…” he stopped abruptly and rubbed his eyes again. “I have to deal with it,” he said. “I know there’s nothing you can really do to help, but you’re not supposed to make it _worse_!”

Instinctively, Hera reached for him, hand passing through the air between them until it came to rest gently on his shoulder. Ezra didn’t respond, except to tense his posture slightly. She allowed her fingers to squeeze gently. “You haven’t even heard what I have to say,” she told him. “Hear me out first, okay?”

Ezra sucked in a deep breath and released it slowly. He swiped at his eyes for a third and final time, before nodding, still looking in the opposite direction. “Fine. You said something about conditions?” he whispered. “What are they?”

Hera sighed. This would be so much easier if he would just turn around and let her see him. She allowed her hand to fall away from his shoulder and placed it in her lap.

“First, let me ask you a question, and I want you to answer truthfully,” she said.

Even staring at the back of his head, she could see his curiosity in the way he stilled. She waited for a few seconds longer, and he turned around to glance at her, a frown on his face.

“How are you today?” she asked.

His frown deepened. “Are you serious?”

“Very,” she assured him.

Looking mistrustful, as though dubious of her motives, he turned a little further in her direction, putting her squarely in front of him. The whites of his eyes were tinged a little pink, but there was otherwise no sign of the tears she was certain he had wiped away just moments earlier. “Fine,” he said. The anger in his voice belied his response, but it was exactly what she had expected.

“How are your eyes?” she tried.

He looked away again, but didn’t swivel his chair this time. Instead he angled his gaze down into his lap. “They’re okay. I can see fine right now.”

Hera nodded. For the most part, she supposed that was probably true. The light level in the cockpit was relatively high, and from what she understood of the way Sacul Syndrome worked, right now his vision shouldn’t be too bad. But that was now, she had phrased the question wrong if she had been looking for a broader answer. “And at other times?” she ventured.

“I don’t get… why are you asking me this? What difference does it make?”

“It makes a difference,” she assured him. “Just humor me, okay?”

Ezra took very slow, very deep breath and released it as a heavy sigh. The fingers of one hand worried a worn patch on the seam of his pants leg, and he kept his gaze focussed there, as though it were vitally important that he concentrate on the action. “Sometimes they’re not great,” he admitted quietly.

Hera nodded. “Thank you,” she said. She paused for a moment, giving him an opportunity to relax. Those few words had clearly been difficult for him, and she wasn’t done yet. “What about when it gets dark?” she asked. “You’ve been having trouble reading normal-sized print, how bad is that? What else are you having difficulty with at normal light levels? What about your peripheral vision, is it a problem yet? How much of one?”

Ezra’s hand stilled, fingers frozen in the action of picking the hole in his seam. “I… um… That’s a lot of questions.” He resumed the task of unpicking the stitching at the bottom of the small hole, fingers working frantically now, the action appearing to take all his concentration.

That was okay. She hadn’t really expected an answer to those questions. Not yet, at least. “I know. I’m sorry,” she told him. “But these are questions that I need you to be able to answer. More than that, I need you to be able to volunteer the information. I understand you not wanting to talk about it, but if I’m relying on you to be able to perform a task, I have to know that it’s something you can do, and I have to know that if you can’t, you’re going to be honest about that. Do you understand that?”

Ezra nodded. He enclosed the fidgeting fingers of his right hand with those of his left to still them, and looked up at her.

“That’s the first thing,” she said. “Honesty. I’m not saying you’re not honest already, just that from now on you can’t withhold anything. You notice any changes, you need to tell me, or you need to tell Kanan. I need to know what you can do right now, and what you can’t. And if anything changes, either you suddenly find that you can’t do something anymore, or you’re having trouble with it, or if you master some new way to compensate and suddenly you _can_ do something that you couldn’t before, tell me.”

Ezra frowned, but nodded.

“Even if you don’t think it’s relevant to missions,” she added. “Even if you _know_ it’s not. Because it’s not just about that, Ezra. I want to know what’s happening; the good things and the bad. I want to be involved. I care about you, and I don’t want to lose you to this. Do you understand?”

Ezra blinked. His eyes reflected the lights from the control panel in their brilliant blue, wide with surprise and damp with emotion. He nodded again. “I can do that,” he told her.

In theory, yes he could. And she had no doubt that he believed it at that moment, but in practice, that remained to be seen. She smiled anyway. “Thank you,” she said, and took a deep breath. “But that’s only the first thing.”

“Yeah,” Ezra said. He started, and then instantly stopped picking at his seam again. “I know, you said. There’s nothing wrong with my ears.” He smiled awkwardly. “My eyes either, really, most of the time. Yet.”

Hera pressed her lips together. ‘Most of the time’ wasn’t good enough. “Okay. Compensation techniques for those other times though, because they’re going to happen more and more as time goes on. Imagine something for a moment,” she told him. “Imagine you’re on a mission, doesn’t matter where, or what, but imagine the power gets cut somehow. Or you’re on a planet for longer than you expected, the sun goes down. What do you do?”

Ezra frowned. “It would depend.”

“Okay, so there are multiple options? Give me one of them.”

She watched him search his mind for an appropriate answer. “I probably wouldn’t be on my own,” he said.

“So you rely on your teammates to keep you safe,” she said.

“No! Well, maybe. But Kanan’s been trying to teach me some of what he does, so there’ll be that, I guess. Also,” he tapped at something attached to his belt, and she saw a small flashlight there, next to his lightsaber. It didn’t look as though it would cast much light, but it might make a difference. It was a good idea, an example of planning.

Hera nodded. “But you’re hiding, you need not to be seen. A flashlight would give your position away.”

Anger flashed quickly across Ezra’s expression, but disappeared quickly, replaced by something more like frustration. “That’s not fair,” he said. “You keep changing the scenario.”

“A real life mission doesn’t always go according to the plan,” Hera told him. “Sometimes, things go wrong, or you have to change plans at the last minute, or improvise. You know that; you’ve had to do it yourself more than once.”

“I’m learning how to get around without seeing,” he said. “Like I said, Kanan’s been teaching me.”

Hera nodded. “Okay, good. Can you show me?”

“Show you..?”

“Something you’ve learned.”

Ezra hesitated. “How?”

Hera’s eyes darted to one of the switches on the control panel, and before Ezra could even register what she was doing, she reached over and flicked it down. The main light in the cockpit went out and the glow of the control panel reduced significantly. The image from the viewscreen still illuminated the area slightly; more than well enough for her to see the surprise and then fear that registered in his expression. His hands gripped the armrests of his chair tightly, and she watched his eyes dart around, unable to focus on anything in a way that reminded her painfully of Kanan.

“Are you okay?” she asked him. It wasn’t even that dark, but it was painfully obvious that if he could see anything at all, it was nothing of any use.

Ezra nodded emphatically. “Sure, of course.”

Hera felt a pang of sympathy, and she didn’t want to have to do this. “Can you show me something?” she asked again.

For a moment, she thought he was going to get up. She held her breath, willing him to do something, anything at all, even if it was only to make an attempt. He stopped, halfway through getting to his feet, and sank back into his chair, every muscle tense. “I don't want to do this right now,” he said.

“But if you were on a mission…”

Ezra lifted one foot onto the seat of his chair and hooked his arms around his knee, hugging it tightly. “Do you think I haven’t thought about this stuff?” he asked.

He looked so small, all she wanted to do was reach for him, hold him, promise him that it was going to be okay. But she couldn't do that, not yet. “I think you have,” she told him. “But I think you just instantly dismissed it and pretended it was never going to happen. All I’m saying is, what if it does?”

“So that’s it?” he asked, speaking into the space somewhere just to her left. “No more missions ever, in case it goes dark? Kanan never…”

“This isn’t about Kanan, this is about you. And you know I’m not saying no more missions. I’m telling you that you need to be prepared for these things. You need a plan in place, and I need to know what it is and how it’s going to work. So does anybody who may be with you.”

He sighed angrily. “Fine,” he said, “So I give in. What is the answer? What am I supposed to do in this scenario?”

Hera frowned. “I don’t know. It’s not a quiz with a right and a wrong answer. This is part of what I mean about being open. What you can do, and what you can’t. You need to know that it’s okay to ask for help. And then we can work out the answers together.”

Ezra sighed, and nodded, still not able to find her in the darkness. “Okay,” he said. “So, have a plan for everything, that’s the second thing.”

“Good advice for anybody,” Hera told him. “But in your case, you need to know what you’re going to do in every possible scenario, or you have to sit the whole thing out.”

He shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “So, now you’ve made your point, can you turn the lights back on? Please?”

She slipped her hand across and flipped the switch back up. The lights came back on in an instant, and she blinked as her eyes adjusted. She watched Ezra release his knee from its hug, and get to his feet. He folded his arms and began to walk slowly into the back of the ship, before turning around and walking back again. “Thanks,” he said.

“The third thing,” Hera told him quickly, before she lost her momentum. “Appointments with the med droid. You need to make them, and you need to keep them.”

Ezra slowed his pace slightly and turned to face her. “Why?”

“Because it’s important. I spoke to it, and…”

“What? When? You don’t have access to my files.”

Hera held up both hands in mock defense. “Believe me, I know. I spoke to it in general terms, about the condition. But that brings me to another point. Like Sato told you, I need access. Even if it’s just to talk about your eyes and nothing else. I’m not going to pry, I just want to know that if I need to ask it something, I can. And that’s why I need you to attend your appointments regularly, so that the information it holds is up to date.”

He shook his head. “It’s not necessary. It’s not like Noisi can do anything to help.”

“Noisy? I don’t care. It’s for your benefit too; you need to be able to monitor the progress in more than anecdotal terms. You need to know what to expect, and when; if it’s progressing at the expected speed, if anything’s making it worse, or better. N015 is designed for eye problems. It’ll be able to give the relevant advice.”

Ezra opened his mouth, presumably to protest, and then clamped it closed again. He unfolded his arms, then folded them again, and finally sighed in resignation. “How long do I have to keep going for?”

Hera bit her lip. “For as long as it takes.”

“As long as what takes?”

She didn’t answer. She didn’t have to. She saw him make the connection as soon as the words left his lips. 

He sank back into the copilot’s chair and turned away from her again. “Right,” he said. “Got it.” He sighed deeply and stared out into space through the screen, eyes very obviously drinking in the view as though he was afraid it may be the last time he saw it.

“Ezra,” she asked. “Are you okay?”

“Great,” he said flatly. “Anything else?”

She shook her head. “Nothing important.”

“Good.” He continued to stare out of the viewscreen, not even so much as glancing in her direction. “You’re right, you know. If something goes wrong, I’m not ready.”

It sounded strange to hear him admit that. She forced herself to sit still and listen, and waited for more.

“But do you know what?” he continued. “I never have been. None of us are; you included. It just doesn’t work that way. When you’re in the field, you have to be able to think on your feet. So if I can’t do that anymore, what you’ve just told me is that it’s over and I might as well leave, go back to Lothal and find a way to fight the Empire on my own again. That way at least I’d be able to…” He tailed off and sighed. “If I wait until I can do everything you want from me, I’m not going to be out there again until long after I’ve stopped needing those appointments.”

“No, that’s not it at all,” Hera insisted. “I’m not saying you need to tell me what you’ll do in every single situation; just that I need to know that you can handle yourself. Don’t stop thinking on your feet, just think in advance about what that might involve.”

Ezra tore his gaze from the viewscreen for a moment to look at her. “So how am I supposed to prove myself to you?” he asked. “How do you decide when I’m ‘ready’?”

The truth was, she didn’t know the answer to that. There was no definite reply that she could give him; no standard to work toward. “I’ll know,” she said.

He shook his head. “That’s nice and vague,” he said. “Can’t you give me something? Like a challenge that once I can do it, I’m in. Something I can work toward instead of…” he waved his hand in the air, presumably indicating the uncertainty.

“Okay.” Hera pursed her lips. “But you won’t like it.”

“Try me.”

She inhaled slowly. “Eventually, you’re going to have to be able to function without any vision at all,” she said, keeping her words slow and measured.

She watched Ezra’s face for his reaction to that statement, but there was none. It wasn’t the calm acceptance of someone that had come to terms with an uncomfortable fact, but the carefully-schooled expression of someone desperately trying to give that impression. 

“As soon as you can demonstrate that you can do that, you're back in.”

His face grew visibly paler, though he succeeded in keeping his expression neutral. “So, blindfold?” he said.

“Not necessarily. It could be in the dark, or some other way of obscuring your vision, but essentially, yes. If you can move around an area you don’t know without any problems, if you can defend yourself, if you can do everything that you can do now, but without your sight, then you can forget the other stuff.”

He frowned and drummed his fingertips on his knee. “Okay,” he said, and exhaled slowly. “Okay.”

“But Ezra, you don’t need to be able to do that yet. You’ll find the other things much easier, I promise.”

He didn’t reply, but the expression on his face was easy to read. Neither option was easy, nothing was easy, and Hera, who had no right at all to talk about what and was not possible for him, was putting more and more obstacles in his way at every turn.

“I’m sorry,” she said, not sure whether she was speaking about the conditions she was having to impose, or the situation that made them necessary. Whichever apology he heard, he simply shrugged dismissively. She reached across to touch him on the shoulder.

Ezra stiffened in surprise, and she realized belatedly that she had approached him from the side, and that there was a good chance that he hadn’t seen her, but he quickly relaxed again.

“I know it’s not helpful, but you know I’d swap places with you in a heartbeat if I could, don’t you?”

He turned and looked her straight in the eye searchingly. “Yeah, well I’m glad you can’t,” he told her. His expression morphed into a sad smile, and he shook his head. “You’re a pilot, Hera. I mean, no offense, but there’s no way you’d be able to cope!”

He was joking, or at least he spoke as though he was joking, but he was probably right. The idea of losing the sense of freedom she got behind the controls of a spacecraft… she couldn’t even imagine it; she didn’t want to try. But she liked to think that she would do it for him, or for Kanan, if she could. Not that it mattered; life didn’t work that way. “Come here,” she said, getting to her feet and extending her arms to him.

Ezra hesitated for a moment, before climbing to his feet and stepping forward. She wrapped her arms around him tightly, as though they could protect him, and he hugged her back like somebody clinging on for dear life.

“You’re going to be fine,” she whispered in his ear.

He held her tighter in response, but said nothing at all.


	2. Chapter 2

Kanan reached for the towel that he had placed on the back of the chair by his bed, and used it to vigorously rub at his damp hair.  As he did, the door to his quarters chimed once before opening with its familiar swishing sound. **  
**

“We need to talk.”

Kanan frowned.  He inclined his head as though looking down at his half-dressed body.  “Right now?” he asked.  

“Right now,” Hera confirmed.  She stepped fully into the room and allowed the door to close behind her, at least sheltering him from the view of anybody else who might have happened to walk past.

He sighed, rubbed at his hair a few more times, and placed the towel over the back of the chair again.  He ran his fingers a few times through his hair to get the worst of the knots out.  It didn’t really work.  “I’m a little busy,” he said.  “Can it at least wait until I have a shirt on?”

Hera hesitated for a moment, then turned away from him.  He felt the mild wave of embarrassment coming from her, almost completely masked by a sense of urgency and a touch of amusement at his state of undress.  “Sorry,” she said.  “I didn’t even notice, I’m… other things…”

He let out a small laugh, “It’s okay, at least you let me get some pants on this time, before you burst through the door.”  He pulled his fingers through his hair a few more times, snagging at the knots; it had been a long time since he had cut it, and it felt a lot longer than when he had last seen himself.  Of course, that wouldn’t be the only difference in his appearance, or the most significant one.  His hand skimmed the surface of his small table until it found his comb, and he began to drag it through his hair.  He didn’t put the shirt on yet, or his hair would damp the collar.  “So, what’s so important?  You can turn back around, by the way, it’s nothing you haven’t seen before.”

She did; her footsteps sounded out noticeably in the otherwise silent room.  It was strange sometimes to be aboard the Ghost and not hear the constant thrum of the engines.  For most of the time he had been on the ship, it had been in space.  Spending so long on the ground felt wrong, somehow.  He wondered whether Hera felt the same way.  He made a mental note ask her sometime.  Sometime when she didn’t appear so agitated.

“It’s about Ezra.  I had a meeting with Sato last night,” she said.  Her tone of voice was serious, as though something very significant had been discussed.  Kanan had a good idea what it might be.  He had known about the meeting; it was ostensibly to discuss upcoming mission plans, but he didn’t doubt that they would have strayed to other topics.

He remained silent, giving her time to finish what she was saying before he interrupted her chain of thought with questions or assumptions.  He knew from experience that that would be the best way to proceed.  He gathered his hair into a bunch and began to comb the ends quickly, working the knots out from the bottom up.

Hera paused, as though waiting for him to question her, or possibly even attack her with words.  When he didn’t, she took a deep breath and sighed before she continued.  “Sato put me in charge of deciding when to clear Ezra for duty, and I told him it wasn’t going to be yet.”

“Right.”  He wasn’t surprised; he wasn’t even sure he disagreed.  He knew it wasn’t the decision that he would have made, but he had the luxury of not being in charge.  He didn’t envy her the conversation she was going to have to have with Ezra later today.  Of course, she was probably here to ask him to be in on the discussion.

Something about that didn’t seem right, however.  He would have anticipated worry, concern over whether she had made the right decision, over how exactly to phrase what she wanted to say.  Hera seemed as though she was in a rush, like she was trying to outrun some disaster.

A worrying thought occured.  “Wait,” he said.  “You told Sato, or you told Ezra?”

A short pause.  “Ezra.  I told Ezra, this morning.”

That wasn’t good.  It was also puzzling, because although he had been busy working out that morning, he was sure he would have felt some kind of a fluctuation through the Force as Ezra reacted to that news.  He hadn’t been so far away that he wouldn’t have noticed.  He tried to control his reaction, gave his untangled hair a final squeeze with the towel and waited for her to say something else.  When she didn’t continue, he replied.  “So, why would you do a thing like that?”  

“Because it was the right decision.”  He could hear the frustration in her voice.  He could hear the hours she must have spent overnight wrestling with the decision, and the likely difficult conversation she had just come from with Ezra.  Whether or not it was the right decision was debatable, but now was not the time for that debate.

“Okay,” he said, inviting more information.

“I just wanted you to know about this, because I think the first thing he’s going to do is come here and talk to you about it, and I wanted you to be prepared.”

Kanan nodded.  “And you didn’t think it might be a good idea for me to be prepared beforehand?  Maybe discuss your decision, work out some terms for him to come back?  Maybe I could’ve been there for the discussion.”

“I…” she hesitated, “thought you’d try to change my mind.”

Would he?  Maybe.  Probably.  It depended on exactly what her decision was.  It wouldn’t have been an outright ‘no’, Ezra  _was_  going to return to active duty, just as soon as he was ready.  It was simply a matter of knowing what ‘ready’ meant.  He would have wanted to know her exact thinking process, and what precisely Ezra would have to do to prove himself, because there would be something, he was sure of that, and if he had disagreed with her ideas then yes, he would have tried to change her mind.

“We need to be united on this,” Hera added.

Kanan took a deep breath and released it very slowly, trying to keep himself calm.  He wasn’t angry, he trusted Hera, he knew she would have thought very carefully before she said anything to Ezra.  It was just frustrating to have been left out of the loop, especially given his unique perspective.  “There was never any question of this with me,” he said.  He had come back when he was ready, and nobody had suggested that he shouldn’t.  He wasn’t sure how he would have reacted if they had.

“That was different.  You took yourself out of the fight, you didn’t come back until you felt you were ready.”

She wasn’t entirely right.  He didn’t dispute that he had been ready, but he hadn’t felt it.  He hadn’t had any choice, Ezra had needed him.

“Anyway, there would have been a discussion, if it had been necessary.  If you’d been doing something that might have put people at risk.  And when you did come back, it… was discussed, actually.  That decision was left with me too.”

Kanan stopped, halfway to the closet to retrieve a shirt.  That was news to him, that there had been any question of his competency… it made sense, he supposed.  But he should have been told, surely.

Actually, he should have known.

He turned to say something, still not entirely sure what, when through the Force, he noticed Ezra moving quickly in their direction.  “If there’s anything else you want me to know before I talk to Ezra, you’d better tell me now, I think we have about thirty seconds.”

“I…” He could sense her motion as she turned to look at the door, and then back to him.  “I gave him three conditions he has to meet…  If he can do that, we can start thinking about him joining missions again.  They’re not  _really_  difficult, well, for Ezra they might be, but…”  She was interrupted by a knock on the door, which opened, seemingly of its own accord, half a second later.

“Does nobody wait to be invited in any more?” Kanan asked.

Ezra hesitated for a moment, having clearly found a scene that he hadn’t expected.  “Uh… sorry,” he muttered, and backed away slightly.

“No, it’s fine, come on in,” Kanan beckoned to him with one hand.  He grabbed a shirt from the closet, and closed the door before pulling it on.  “So, it sounds like you’ve both had a busy morning,” he said.

“I need to start proper lessons,” Ezra blurted.  “Not meditating and trying to listen to things, I need to be learning how to  _do_  things.  How to do everything, without looking.”

To his side Kanan could sense tension coming from Hera, but she didn’t say anything.  Kanan frowned.  “Okay.  We are going to get to that stuff, it’s just that we need to work on the other things first.  You need a good grounding in…”

“No,” Ezra told him.  His emotions were all frustration and desperation.  “You don’t understand, I can’t just sit around while you all carry on as normal.  Not being allowed to do anything is making things  _worse_.  I need to learn it, now.”

Kanan frowned.  “I know.  You do, but not yet, not all at once.”

“If I want to be on missions again, I do.”

Hera stepped forward.  “Ezra, that’s not what I said.”

“Yes it is!”

“Okay,” Kanan deliberately stepped between them, separating them.  “What?  Just… what’s going on?”

Hera sighed.  “He didn’t like the conditions I gave him, thought they were too subjective.  He wanted me to give him a task he could do to prove himself, so…”

He was starting to get a bad feeling about this.  “Okay, I think I get the picture,” he said.  He turned to face Hera, but he simply couldn’t think of anything to say.  At least, not with Ezra there; Hera was right, they needed to back each other up, and if she had made a promise like that, it was too late to take it back.  “What were the conditions?” he asked her instead.  “The  _other_  ones.”

Ezra answered for her, speaking as though by rote, as if he had committed a list to memory: “Honesty, keeping you informed about what’s happening, what I can and can’t do; being prepared, having a plan for any situation in case things go wrong…”

That didn’t sound so bad, though if he actually sat down and thought about what that would actually mean, from Ezra’s point of view, he suspected he would start to find problems there.

“And going to see the med droid,” Ezra finished in a sullen voice.  “Wait, you didn’t know this already?”

If miming slapping yourself in the head was an emotion, Hera was experiencing that right now.  It wasn’t something that he could put into words, but it was definitely the overriding feeling that was coming at him through the Force.

“Uh…” he said.  Could he fix this?  More importantly, could he fix this without getting himself into any more trouble than he already was?

“You didn’t, did you?” Ezra said.  He leaned around him to face Hera.  “So much for being honest,” he almost spat the words at her.

“I never told you that Kanan…”  Hera stopped speaking.  She probably hadn’t actually lied, but to Ezra, that wouldn’t matter.  He could feel Hera’s anger, her frustration, and ultimately her sense of defeat.  She sighed again, more deeply this time.  “You’re right,” she said.  “I’m sorry.”

Ezra folded his arms and sank into the chair, probably leaning his back against the wet towel that still lay there – Kanan didn’t bother to mention that – and sat in silence, the same silence that descended over the whole room.

Hera sighed deeply.  She turned to face Kanan and touched him lightly on the forearm, making sure that she had his attention and that he knew that she was aiming this apology just at him.  “I’m sorry,” she repeated.  “I should have spoken to you first, I just…”

She just thought that he would talk her out of it, and she might have been right.  Especially that last one, though it sounded as though she had never really intended to say that.  Maybe, if he had been there, she wouldn’t.  The others, he wasn’t sure.  He would definitely have discussed them with her, tried to change anything that he didn’t agree with, made sure that it was expressed in such a way that Ezra understood what he was being asked to do.  Ezra had thought the conditions were too subjective, and he was probably right.  That was something that they could have fixed, together, before Ezra even heard about them.

“It’s okay,” he said.  It was too late to do anything about it, no point getting into recriminations at a time when they desperately needed to be working together.  “It’s done.”  He sighed.

Ezra was blocking his presence in the Force again, disguising his emotional response by effectively hiding himself completely.  He had been doing it more and more often lately, whenever he didn’t want Kanan to know what he was feeling.  Unable to gauge his feelings by looking at him, or to communicate an apology for what he was about to say with a burst of eye contact, he was left with no other option but to hope for the best.

“You were probably right,” he said, speaking softly in the futile hope that Ezra might miss the words.

Hera tightened her touch on his arm in silent acknowledgement, just as he realized he hadn’t specified what precisely she had been right about.  

“The final condition though,” he added.  “I don’t think I like that one.  What was it, exactly?”

He was aware of Hera glancing in Ezra’s direction, to the emotional blank spot in the corner of the room – he wondered whether Ezra realized how frustrating that was – and he wished that he could ask her for a report.  He concentrated his awareness in that direction; he could sense Ezra’s location, as though he were nothing more than an object in the room.  If he concentrated very hard, he could even make out the position in which he was sitting, but beyond that he wasn’t sure of anything.  He was missing details that he would usually be able to usually pick up without even trying.

“To be able to function without vision as well as he can function with,” Hera told him.  “But I didn’t expect him to want to try it now.  If he could just concentrate on the other things, he could be back on active duty in weeks, if he…” she stopped, and turned in Ezra’s direction.  Her tone changed as she addressed him in an imploring manner.  “If you try to do it this way, it’ll be longer.  You can learn those things as you go.”

Ezra didn’t respond.  Or maybe he did, he was still hiding in the Force.  Kanan waited, giving him a moment, in case he was trying to come up with an answer.  When Ezra still said nothing, Kanan nodded.  “I think you’re overlooking one vital point,” he said to Hera.  “He’s seventeen, you’ve just bet against him, did you think he was just going to accept that?”

“I didn’t do that,” Hera told him.  But she had, in a way.  She had set him a task, and told him that it was too difficult yet, and that he should do something else instead.  Kanan knew he wouldn’t have accepted that at seventeen.  Actually, he probably still wouldn’t accept it now.

“Anyway,” he added.  “I think you’re underestimating how much he hates Enno-fifteen.”

From the other side of the room, he heard a snort of quickly suppressed laughter, and suddenly Ezra’s presence was back.

“Oh, that droid…” Hera said.  “I’d forgotten how much  _I_  didn’t like it too.”

“Really?” Ezra asked, curious.  “Why?”

She shrugged.  “I suppose the fault isn’t actually with the droid, it’s with whoever programmed its personality.”

“You should see how excited he is about this.” Ezra told her.  Kanan hadn’t been concentrating in Ezra’s direction, so he missed any gestures he might have made, but he imagined him indicating his eyes with a wave of his hand, in the same way that Kanan himself sometimes did.  “ _It’s fascinating, the condition is very effective_.” Ezra’s voice took on a strange, stilted quality as he executed a reasonably accurate impression of Enno-fifteen’s voice.

Hera laughed.  “Did you tell him what it said to you?” she asked, addressing Kanan.

Kanan shook his head.  “I don’t know, he said a lot of things.” 

“The injury, while interesting in cause…”

“…is disappointingly mundane in effect,” Kanan finished for her.  That one had stung, at the time.  But of course, most things had back then.  He shook his head. “Yeah.  I don’t think it’s anything personal, he’s just really into eye conditions.  He was programmed that way so he can treat them.”

Ezra made a scoffing noise, but there appeared to be genuine amusement behind it.  “Yeah?  Well, for a droid designed to treat this stuff, he’s done a pretty terrible job with both of us.”

Not true, actually.  But Ezra didn’t know the full extent of Kanan’s injury, and how much worse it could have been.  Now wasn’t the time for that discussion.  He smiled instead; it had been an attempt at a joke, after all; and possibly the first one he had made since this whole thing started.

“So, you’re going to teach me?” Ezra said.

He sighed.  Of course he was going to teach him; teaching him had always been the plan.  He had just expected to do it a little slower than Ezra seemed to be hoping for right now, he knew that no matter how quickly Ezra progressed, it was never going to be enough for him.  He was aiming for a target that, while not impossible — Kanan himself was proof of that — was far beyond his abilities at the moment.

On the other hand, he himself had learned by being thrown in at the figurative deep end, not by wading in slowly.  He had had a lot of the groundwork down already, some of which Ezra did not, but generally speaking, perhaps Ezra was right.  Maybe they did need to go straight to the difficult stuff.  If nothing else, it would make the other things appear easy by comparison.

Anyway, no matter what he thought of Hera’s decision to throw in that extra condition – and they would definitely have to talk about that some more later, when they were alone – it appeared to have spurred Ezra on somewhat.  The reluctance was gone, the attempts to avoid anything that ran the risk of reminding him of what was coming, replaced by a desire to learn what he needed to know, and that was a gift that Kanan wasn’t going to turn down.  There would be days when the last thing Ezra wanted to do was close his eyes and try to function without vision, and it wouldn’t be long before the days came when he had no choice in the matter.  Better to do this now, while he was able and willing.

“Kanan?” Hera asked him.  She rested a hand on his arm again, bringing him back to reality.

He nodded.  “Of course I’m going to teach you,” he told Ezra.  “Just, don’t be too disappointed if you can’t do what you’re hoping for right away.”

Hera patted him on the arm.  “I’ll leave you to it,” she said.

Kanan frowned as she left; if she thought this was over, she was in for a surprise.

“You know,” Ezra said, “you should leave your hair loose more often, I think Hera likes it.”

His hand went immediately to his damp hair, hanging loose around his face.  The band that usually tied it back was digging a groove into his wrist.  He sighed, and looped it a couple of times around his hair.  He would fix it later, when it was dry.  Right now, he had a lesson to teach.

Somehow.


	3. Chapter 3

With Hera gone, a thick silence descended over Kanan’s quarters.  With great effort, Ezra resisted the urge to fill it with meaningless chatter, and instead waited for Kanan to say something first.

Only, he didn’t.  Kanan was still standing by the far end of the bunks, almost the same position he had been in since Ezra had burst into the room.  He leaned one shoulder against the top bunk, arms folded and a thoughtful expression on his still uncovered face.

His hair was noticeably damp from the shower, and probably beginning to soak into the collar of his shirt.  “Sorry for bursting in on you like that,” Ezra said quietly, when Kanan still didn’t say anything.  “I can go, come back later, if you want?”  He didn’t  _want_  to do that – he wanted to get started as soon as possible, before he lost his nerve – but he could do it, if he had to.

Kanan shook his head.  “No,” he said.  “You’re right, we need to make a start.”

But he  _didn’t_  make a start.  Instead he continued to stand there, wearing the same thoughtful expression, as though he was trying to decide how to proceed.  Ezra bit down gently on his bottom lip, still resisting the urge to fill the silence with nervous chatter.  He leaned against the back of his chair, folded and then unfolded his arms nervously, and waited.

“She wasn’t wrong,” Kanan said, eventually.  “Hera, I mean.  She shouldn’t have given you that last condition, but the rest of it… she wasn’t wrong.”

“Yes, she…” Ezra began, but stopped himself.  There was no point.  Even if Kanan disagreed with Hera’s decision, he probably wouldn’t be able to change her mind.  The only thing Ezra could do now was work as hard as he could toward meeting the goal that had been set for him.  He wasn’t going to pretend he was okay with it though.  “Okay, maybe,” he said instead.  “If it was worse, but it’s not yet.  I’m still okay, I can still see, I can still handle myself fine on missions.  One day, yeah, but…”  he tailed off, and shook his head in angry denial.  “I’m still okay.”

Kanan listened to him, allowing him time to finish, and then nodded.  “When, then?”  he asked.

Ezra frowned; he hadn’t expected that question.  It wasn’t really something that he could answer, and surely Kanan knew that.  Of course, maybe that was the reason he had asked it, to prove a point.  “I don’t know,” Ezra said.  “When it’s… I mean, when I… A few months, maybe?  It depends on how quickly it…” he stopped, took a deep breath and tried again.  “If I can learn what I need to know quickly enough, then maybe never.” 

He didn’t think he would learn enough that quickly, but it wasn’t impossible.  The only thing he knew for certain at this point was that Hera was wrong; that for now, he  _was_  still capable of going on missions.  That wouldn’t be the case forever, and if – he didn’t want to consider the possibility, but he had to – if he couldn’t learn how to do what Kanan did, very soon he really wouldn’t be able to do that ever again.

That thought hurt.  And it was all the more reason, surely, to let him go now, while he still could.

“And how would Hera know when you needed to stop?” Kanan asked.  “Would you tell her?”

“Of course I would!” Ezra told him.  “I’d never put people in danger.”

Kanan nodded.  “I know you wouldn’t, not intentionally.  Maybe the real question should have been, how would  _you_  know when you needed to stop?”

Ezra sighed angrily, but maybe Kanan was right.  He liked to think he would know the right time, but what if he was wrong?  It wasn’t like he hadn’t proven himself capable of making bad decisions in the past.  No matter how sure he was that he would know when to stop, could he really blame Hera for wanting to be certain?

He didn’t reply.  It didn’t matter what he said anyway, the decision was made.  All he could do now was try to meet the condition that Hera had set out for him.

Suddenly, he noticed that his back felt uncomfortably cold.  Ezra shifted slightly in his seat, and his clothing stuck to his skin as he moved.  He twisted around and found the cause: the chair where he was sitting had a towel slung over the back, and he had been leaning against it for the past few minutes

“Hey,” he said.  “Is this wet?”  He squeezed it to test.  It felt only damp, but that was probably because most of the water had soaked into his clothes by now.  “Ugh!  Great,” he complained, and pulled the towel from the back of the chair, folded it into a square, and placed it on the floor, directly underneath the chair, where it couldn’t trip anybody.

Kanan either smiled or grimaced, Ezra wasn’t sure which.  “That’s what happens when you walk in on me getting dressed after a shower,” he said.  He leaned over, retrieved the towel, shook it out and placed it on the back of the chair again, making sure to hang it down the back this time, rather than the front.  Not that it mattered anymore.  In fact, leaning against it again might even dry him off.  Ezra pinched the fabric of his top and pulled it away from his skin.  It felt unpleasantly damp.

Kanan backed away a few steps, folded his arms again, then took a step forward.  “I wasn’t expecting to be teaching you anything today,” he admitted.  “I was trying to decide where to start.”

Anywhere would be good.  As long as it wasn’t meditation.  Ezra waited for a continuation he was sure was coming.

“You’ve just helped me with that,” Kanan told him, “because it looks like lesson one is going to have to be ‘don’t leave things on the floor’.”

“I didn’t!” Ezra told him, indignantly.

Kanan turned to face him directly, raising an amused but incredulous eyebrow as he did.  If Ezra hadn’t known that Kanan was blind, even despite the scar, it would have been easy to believe that he was looking directly at him.

“Fine,” Ezra said.  “I  _did_  put the towel on the floor, but I made sure it was under the chair.  Trust me, even if Hera hadn’t drilled the rule about keeping things tidy into everyone last year, I’d have figured that one out on my own before now.”  

He winced even as he said that.  It had been the wrong thing to admit just minutes after insisting he was fine to go on missions.  He  _was_  fine.  He just had to take extra care now, and he did.  In his quarters, where he went to relax, he made sure that the floor was clear of hazards; his boots and anything else he or Zeb might have been using carefully put away where they wouldn’t get underfoot.  He had to be more vigilant on missions anyway; everybody did.

“I put it under the chair,” he repeated.  “Nobody’s going to be walking there.”

“I know.”  Kanan sat down heavily on the centre of the bottom bunk.  He tucked a stray strand of hair behind one ear, and leaned forward slightly.  “Have you ever lost something?” he asked.  “Not  _lost_  lost it or had it stolen, or anything like that.  I’m just talking about just putting something down for a moment, then not being able to find it when you go to pick it up again.”

Ezra swallowed.  He knew exactly where this was going.

“You know, when find yourself looking around for something, and you know it can’t be far because you haven’t  _been_  anywhere, but for some reason it’s just gone.  Has that ever happened to you?”

Kanan kept his tone casual, but Ezra was sure he could hear tension and repressed frustration there as he remembered whatever incident, or incidents, he was referring to.  Ezra nodded.  “Yeah,” he said quietly.  “Okay, fine.  I get it.”  He willed Kanan not to continue, to just leave it at that, let the rest be taken care of by his imagination.

“Okay,” Kanan continued, either not picking up on Ezra’s silent message, or making a conscious decision to ignore it.  “So imagine having to do that without looking.  Without being  _able_  to look.  Trust me, having to do a fingertip search of your quarters to find a missing comb isn’t a great way to spend an afternoon.”

Ezra tried  _not_  to imagine that.  As Kanan had probably intended, he failed.

“And neither is having to give up and ask someone to find it for you,” Kanan added.  “Especially when they walk through the door and hand it straight to you.”

It was obvious that Kanan was speaking from experience.  That had happened to him, and it was going to happen to Ezra too, probably over and over again.  It wasn’t like Ezra was known for being organized.

“I will be teaching you ways to find things,” Kanan continued.  “If you drop something, or if you’ve just put it down somewhere and forget.  But the first thing you need to remember is, don’t just put things down somewhere.  Not if you can help it.

Ezra took a deep breath in an attempt to quell the panic he could feel bubbling up from deep inside him.  He genuinely hadn’t thought of that.  He had thought of moving around the base, the ship, new places that he didn’t know and had never seen.  He had thought about recognizing people, about fighting, about  _dokma racing_  of all things, but he had never considered the idea of such a mundane thing becoming such a huge problem.  And of course that wouldn’t be the only thing.  There were probably hundreds of little things that had never ever occurred to him.

He looked around the room, and suddenly all he could see was how much he was missing; the fine detail slowly disappearing, the image fading at the edges so much now that he couldn’t help but notice.  It was going to get worse, and it wasn’t going to stop getting worse until…

He put up a block, keeping his emotions private, preventing Kanan from accessing them.  It didn’t matter that Kanan probably knew exactly what he was doing, or that blocking was probably almost as telling as letting the emotions through.

“Well,” he said. He smiled hard, and hoped it would come across in his voice.   Casual; carefree, that was him.  It wasn’t a problem, everything was fine.  “Luckily for me, I don’t really need to comb my hair any more.”  He ran a hand over his short hair.  “So, there’s that,” he added.

Kanan frowned.  Ezra couldn’t tell whether he was irritated by the flippant remark, or by the presence of the block.

“All I’m saying it’s better to have a place for everything,” Kanan continued.  “Know where things should be, and remember to put them back there when you’re done with them, or even when you stop using them for a few minutes.  That, or make sure you put it somewhere that makes sense, and that you’ll be able to find even if you forget.  Get in the habit now, and you won’t have to do it later.”

Ezra remained silent again for a moment.  Still maintaining the block, he got to his feet and began to walk across the room.  When he reached the other side, he stopped, turned and walked back again.  “So where was it?” he asked.  “The comb, I mean.”

Kanan shook his head.  “It had fallen off the bunk onto the floor, and bounced away somehow.  But that’s not important.”

And it wasn’t, but for some reason it also really was.  Ezra tried to put it out of his mind, back to the place with the thousand other things that he hadn’t yet considered.  These were things that he could deal with later, either that Kanan would be able to teach him, or that he might be able to figure out for himself – Kanan had, after all – but they weren’t going to get him back on missions.

“Alright,” he said.  “Okay, I get it.  Don’t put stuff down in stupid places, and try not to drop anything.  Can we get to the other stuff now?”

He could hear the irritation in his voice and it was misplaced.  He wasn’t angry at Kanan for the lesson he was trying to teach, he was angry at himself for not having thought of it, and he was angry at the universe in general, for making it a thing that he would need to consider.

“Which stuff?” Kanan asked him.  “What do you want to learn?  You tell me what you want to know, and I’ll try to start with that.”

Ezra frowned, taken aback.  It sounded like a genuine offer, like whatever he said, Kanan might teach him.  Maybe he had been serious when he had said that he was trying to decide where to start.

He frowned.  He had never been asked to choose what he was going to learn before, and as he had just realized, it wasn’t like he even really  _knew_  what he needed to know, except for in the vaguest of terms.  "You know,“ he said.  "Getting around, knowing how to…” he floundered slightly.  "Everything,“ he said.  "The big stuff.”

“The big stuff.”  Kanan nodded.  “Okay.”  He paused thoughtfully, seeming to mull it over, consider the possibilities, and finally he shook his head.  “Ezra, this  _is_  the big stuff,” he said.  "That’s probably the first thing you need to learn.  The big things are made up of dozens… hundreds of little things.  Like this.“

“No, that’s not what I…” Ezra broke off.  That hadn’t been what he had meant.  The big stuff was, to him, the things that he had already considered; the large, daunting, things hanging over his future, threatening everything.  “I mean, like…” He swallowed, reluctant to invoke the memory of that night, “Getting around, without tripping over some other planet’s equivalent of dokma.”

Kanan frowned.  He folded, and then unfolded his arms, then took a breath and released it as deep sigh.  “I know what you meant; I meant the same thing.”  He paused.  “Think about it, how are you going to master moving around an area if you can’t remember not to leave things out to trip over, and to make sure other people do the same?”

Ezra opened his mouth to reply, but before he could, Kanan continued.

“That’s not the only thing.  Even just inside the ship, – outside is a whole other story, outside in a place you don’t know is something else again – but in the Ghost, you’re going to need to learn the layout of different rooms, you’ll need to get a feel for the size of a space, so you don’t end up, I don’t know, reaching for the door controls when you’re still in the center of the room.  So you feel confident about where you are, and you’re not constantly second-guessing yourself.  And then you’ll need to memorize where things are kept; where you’ll find the cups in the kitchen, which side of the shelf are the ration bars on?  You probably think you know that already, and maybe you do, but you’ll be surprised how much you  _don’t_  know because you’ve just been relying on your ability to see this stuff, and then forgetting it when you’re done.”

“Okay,” Ezra said.  “I get it, but…”

But there was no stopping Kanan now, he was on a roll.  “You’ll have to learn ways of differentiating between objects that feel the same; ways to mark them, or keeping them in slightly different places, and you’ll have to remember the system you used, and be able to replicate it.  You’ll need to learn to maintain your awareness through the Force, keep track of what’s going on around you, both close-by and further away.

“You’ll need remember to keep yourself safe too; to protect your head when you stand up, because you won’t see that closet door that someone left open.  And fingers too, they snag unexpectedly on things that you weren’t expecting to find, corners that you’d forgotten were there, and it hurts.  A lot.  So you need to learn how to explore by touch but without injuring yourself in the process.”

Ezra didn’t bother to reply.  He got the impression that Kanan wasn’t listening to him any more; he was busy in his own memories, listing the things that he had learned the hard way, things he intended to teach Ezra.  It was a lot.  It was too much.

Ezra leaned heavily against the wall and folded his arms.  Kanan appeared to have stopped talking.  He gave him a moment, waiting for the stream of words to begin again.  “You done?” he asked, when they didn’t.

Kanan ran a hand down the front of his face, massaging his brow as he did.  He nodded.  “Yeah,” he said.  “Well, no.  But that’s enough for now.  Too much, probably.  I’m sorry.  All I’m trying to say is, it isn’t as as simple as just teaching you a new Force technique.  If it was, I’d have done it already.”

“Yeah,” Ezra said.  He felt himself slump slightly, leaning against the wall.  “I’m starting to get that.”  As much as he had hoped that Kanan was going to share some secret method with him, he supposed that he had already known there wasn’t going to be one quick fix.  He was facing a long and drawn-out process of learning new ways to do everything, less efficient ways, ways that would be so much more work than simply opening his eyes and looking at something.  “Okay, fine,” he said.  “So, little things.  Give me another one.”

Kanan’s expression softened.  He got to his feet moved toward Ezra and placed one hand on each of his shoulders.  “Lesson one,” he said.  “It’s going to be okay.”

It wasn’t going to be okay.  It was going to be so far from okay.

"Yeah,” he said automatically.  "I know.“

Kanan shook his head.  “It’s alright, I know you don’t believe me,” he said.  "I don’t expect you to.  That doesn’t make it any less true.  It’s going to be okay.   _You’re_  going to be okay.”

Ezra went to shake his head, but realized that he already was; turning it from side to side in silent denial of Kanan’s words, and his own.  Maybe, if he was lucky, things wouldn’t be quite as bad as he thought, but they weren’t going to be ‘okay’.  There was no such thing as ‘okay’, not any more.  There was only the slim possibility of ‘could be worse’.

“Yeah,” he said, still pretending like he believed it.  His voice came out a broken whisper, and he hated it.  He could hear the lie, and he knew that Kanan would detect it even with the block in place.  Just because Kanan was okay now, that didn’t mean things would be the same for Ezra, and Kanan of all people should know that their situations were vastly different; he had years of experience of using the Force intuitively that Ezra just didn’t have.

“I know,” Kanan said, as though responding to the thoughts running through Ezra’s head rather than what he had actually said.  His hands squeezed Ezra’s shoulders again, supportively.  “I know it doesn’t feel like it, and because things don’t feel that way now, so it’s hard to see a future where they will.  I’m not saying it won’t be difficult, or that you’re not going to have to work at it.  I’m not saying you’re ever going to stop feeling the loss, because I don’t know if I will, but you’re going to get through this.  I’m going to make sure of it.”

With genuine effort, Ezra pulled in a deep breath, and exhaled slowly through pursed lips.  “Okay,” he said.  He was nodding, again without intending to.  He still didn’t believe it, not really, but Kanan made him believe that one day he might, and that was good enough for now.

“Okay,” Kanan repeated.  He gave Ezra’s shoulders a final squeeze of support, then let his hands drop away.  “So, let’s talk about your ‘big stuff’.”

Ezra smiled, a little weakly, but it was genuine.  “I thought there was no big stuff,” he said.

Kanan shook his head.  “I said it was all the big stuff,” he clarified.  “But admittedly, some things are bigger than others.”  He sighed.  “I need to spend some time thinking about what to teach you,” he said.  “And the best way to go about it, the right order, that kind of thing.  I’m trying to decide what’s the first thing  _I_  would have wanted to know, and what would have been a better way to learn it.  Once I’ve done that we’ll have a talk about it, and I’ll let you know what to expect, okay?”

Ezra was starting to get the impression that he wasn’t going to be learning anything substantial today.  Disappointment and relief mingled inside him.  He had half expected Kanan to blindfold him and take him on a tour of the base.

Actually, no.  He hadn’t really expected that, but it was definitely a thing they were going to end up doing at some point, and when they did, there would be people around; people that he knew.  People that would see him.  The longer he could put off that particular activity, the better.

“Okay?” Kanan repeated, and Ezra realized that he hadn’t replied the first time.

“Oh,” he pulled himself back into the moment.  “Sorry, yeah.  Okay,” he agreed.

Kanan frowned.  “One thing we do need to talk about before anything else,” he added thoughtfully.  He paused again, and the fingers of one hand touched his beard, smoothing the edges of it to his face.  “You’re hiding your presence in the Force,” he said.

He had never thought of it in that way before.  It was blocking his emotional responses, preventing Kanan from knowing how he was feeling, because it wasn’t something that he wanted to share.

“I understand why you’re doing it, believe me I do,” Kanan continued.  “But you don’t need to do it.  I have a pretty good idea of how you’re feeling about all this.  I know it’s not the same thing I went through, but there are enough similarities there.  You don’t need to hide how you’re feeling.”

Ezra folded his arms and didn’t look at Kanan.  He kept the block firmly in place for now.  

“If you’re blocking me, I can’t tell how you’re responding to something,” Kanan added.  “And before you say it, yes, I know that’s the point.  But if I’m trying to teach you something, I need some feedback so I know whether I need to adjust how I’m explaining it.  I can’t tell that by looking at you any more.  Anyway…” he hesitated briefly.   “Have you ever been talking to someone and they’ve just disappeared?”

Ezra sighed.  This again.  “Yeah, Hera’s already told me about that.  I know I keep leaving when things get awkward, I’ll try to stop it.”  If only to avoid another situation where he ended up trapped in the Phantom to keep him from being able to escape a conversation.  Hera had been right though, he would have left, if he had the chance.

“That’s not what I meant,” Kanan told him, then paused, “Well, okay.  Yes, that too.  But what I mean is that when you block, I can’t sense your presence any more.  It’s like you’re just gone and I’m talking to a blank spot in the room.  There are other ways I’m aware of you, but that’s the main method I use most of the time, and to have you disappear is a little disconcerting.  Being aware of you through the Force isn’t prying.  Yes, it lets me know how you’re feeling, but there are ways for a sighted person to understand that too, that I just can’t do any more.”

Ezra slumped slightly again.  He hadn’t considered that aspect of it.  He could feel Kanan’s presence in the Force, and even while looking right at him, it would be strange for it to blink out of existence.  If he couldn’t see him either…  _when_  he couldn’t… yeah.  Ezra took a deep breath and tried to purge his negative feelings as best he could.  It didn’t exactly work, it never did.  Despite that, with effort, he removed the block, allowing Kanan to sense his presence once again.  “Sorry,” he said.

Kanan smiled.  “It’s okay, and I know you’re still going to do it sometimes.  Just, try not to do it so much, that’s all I ask.”

Ezra nodded.  “Yeah,” he said.  He cleared his throat.  He was going to have to know about sensing people in the Force too, how to recognize different people based on their Force signature, and maybe other ways to use that too.  “Can we start with that?” he asked.  “Recognizing people like that?”

Kanan frowned thoughtfully.  “I suppose it’s as good a place to start as any, for today anyway.  That’s not the only way I’m aware of people though, I’ll tell you about all of it eventually, and you can try it out for yourself.”

Which probably meant blindfold.  In public.  Around other people.  Ezra felt a sharp stab of panic and instinctively reached for his block again, but checked himself and stopped before he disappeared from Kanan’s awareness again.  He swallowed.  “Sounds good,” he lied.

Kanan clasped him on that arm, and nodded.  He was almost definitely aware of what had happened, and Ezra was grateful for his silence. 

“Okay,” Kanan said.  “So, lesson one…”


End file.
